The Boston Massacre

A History with Documents

Neil L. York

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136952944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Lehrmethoden

On March 5, 1770, after being harassed for two years during their occupation of Boston, British soldiers finally lost control, firing into a mob of rioting Americans, killing several of them, including Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave and sailor, the first African American patriot killed. The aftermath of this 'massacre' led to what was eventually the American Revolution. The importance of the event grew, as it was used for political purposes, to stoke the fires of rebellion in the colonists and to show the British in the most unflattering light.

The Boston Massacre gathers together the most important primary documents pertaining to the incident, along with images, anchored together with a succinct yet thorough introduction, to give students of the Revolutionary period access to the events of the massacre as they unfolded. Included are newspaper stories, the official transcript of the trial, letters, and maps of the area, as well as consideration of how the massacre is remembered today.

PART I
CONTEXT

INTRODUCTION

With Blood “Running Like Water”

“The 5th of March 1770, ought to be an eternal warning to this nation,” advised John Adams, because “on that night the foundation of American independence was laid.”¹ Adams was referring to the Boston Massacre, some sixteen years after the fact. He had not witnessed the event but less than an hour later he passed by the spot where it occurred. Sharing the concern of those who wanted reason and justice, not passion and mob violence, to prevail, he agreed to represent nine British soldiers charged with murdering five innocent civilians there. That he and his fellow lawyers for the defense were largely successful—seven acquittals and two convictions, those convictions for manslaughter, not murder—was a source of lasting pride to him. “Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Execution of the Quakers or Witches, anciently,” he reminisced; therefore, “as the Evidence was, the Verdict was exactly right.” Even so, in the very next sentence he also wrote: “This however is no reason why the Town should not call the Action of that Night a Massacre.”²

Adams’s apparent inconsistency—calling the event a massacre and yet contending that the soldiers who did the killing were not guilty of murder—says much about this confused moment in time. By law there had been no massacre; rather, there had been an unfortunate incident, pitting soldiers against civilians. But most Bostonians called it a massacre before the soldiers were prosecuted and it remained just that in their minds after the trials ended, legal outcome notwithstanding. To this day law bows to opinion on the matter. Whatever sense of justice—or injustice—that popular memory has formed about the massacre has less to do with what transpired in the courtroom than with the informal trial that occurred outside it.

Although memory of the massacre has been shaped and reshaped over the past two centuries, for most Americans it still assumes a form that John Adams would recognize and most likely find generally acceptable. Adams lived a very long time—ninety-one years—so he had many opportunities to comment on the Revolutionary America that he helped make. Looking back as the citizen of an independent republic rather than as a subject of the British crown, he singled out turning points that led to that change in identity. Thus his settling on the massacre as the foundation for future independence. But then again he pointed to other events for the same reason, one a decade earlier, when “the child independence was born,” or much earlier still, when Massachusetts was first colonized.³ This shifting about was not because Adams’s recollections were unusually faulty or his memory unnaturally selective. Adams had entered politics to defend American rights in the British empire and, before 1775, he did not intend to leave that empire to form a new nation. With the advantage of hindsight he thought he could see how one led inexorably to the other, for him and for thousands more who joined him as revolutionaries.

Adams once claimed that the massacre was more important to the American revolutionary movement than the fighting at Lexington and Concord, Burgoyne’s defeat, or Cornwallis’s surrender.⁴ Whether it truly was or not is debatable, at best. Nevertheless, there was indeed a direct link between the events of March 5, 1770 and July 4, 1776, which some astute observers in Britain and the colonies had foreseen and yet seemed unable to prevent.

IMPERIAL AUTHORITY AND PROVINCIAL AUTONOMY

Boston’s massacre is a perfect example of how difficult it can be to distinguish cause from effect. The massacre became both simultaneously, as the effect of prior events and the cause of others that would follow. Likewise the massacre resulted from developments peculiar to Boston and developments that could be traced elsewhere in the British empire, as colonies and mother country clashed over nagging questions—of responsibility and right, of liberty and authority, of supremacy and subordination. These questions had been raised from the earliest days of settlement, though they were addressed sporadically and rarely answered to anyone’s lasting satisfaction. Added to these issues were concerns less obviously political, pitting merchants wanting to expand their overseas trade network against imperial authorities trying to contain their activities. Equally as real, if less tangible, was the problem of colonists living in societies of their own making, with transatlantic attachments that, for many, weakened with time.

Eighteenth-century Britain lay claim to an overseas empire produced by a consistent underlying logic, but it had not been built according to a careful blueprint. That logic had been neatly expressed by Richard Hakluyt and other promoters a generation before Boston, founded in 1630, even existed.⁵ In their minds overseas empire was a matter of necessity, not choice, if the then still lowly England wanted to survive in a perennial balance of power competition that pitted one ambitious nation against another. Colonies stimulated trade, trade generated wealth, wealth produced power, and power enabled a nation to dominate its rivals—with Spain’s rise to international prominence as proof. For that to happen in England the men behind imperial expansion believed that exports should exceed imports to preserve what they considered a favorable balance of trade. The resulting profits would fill public and private coffers, enabling investors to expand their operations and generate even more wealth, while also enabling government to field troops and launch fleets to protect and expand the nation’s investments.

The mercantilistic notion that underlay empire-building—the idea that colonies existed to benefit their mother country and that the wealth they produced should work to the mother country’s advantage—appears simple enough but it did not, in and of itself, dictate any prescribed set of policies. Hakluyt contended that Elizabethan England, just venturing out into the Atlantic, ought to have a blue water navy to protect the merchant vessels carrying trade goods between mother country and colonies, with competitors being kept from sharing the wealth and power carried on that transoceanic highway. How that objective was to be reached through actual policy proved complicated. Hakluyt’s vision of England as master of overseas empire was necessarily vague. It was one thing to say that every colony ought to complement the general view; it was quite another to adapt each colony to its particular circumstances while keeping that general view in sight.

From the beginning some colonies fit into the imperial patchwork better than others. All of the colonies founded on the mainland of North America that joined Massachusetts in revolting against the empire in 1775, from Virginia as the first settled in 1607 to Georgia as the last in 1733, had one thing in common: charters from the crown stating the conditions under which they were to be developed. Virtually every one of those charters guaranteed colonists the “rights of Englishmen.” They did not, however, necessarily stipulate what those rights were. Nor did London treat those charters as fundamental law, the equivalent of constitutions. They were granted by the crown and could be vacated through a legal proceeding or simply be set aside—instances of both occurred over the decades. Though some colonies were guaranteed a representative assembly, even those with that guarantee did not have specified what sort of legislation fell within provincial purview and what remained the domain of crown and Parliament. All too often colonial assemblies ended up in an adversarial relationship with Whitehall and Westminster. But that was the result of reality coming into conflict with the ideal, because the original expectation among English expansionists was that colonial governors, assemblies, and courts would work in concert, not at cross-purposes, with imperial authorities in London.

Free trade promises extended to the earliest adventurers for English overseas empire like John Cabot were retracted once that empire took on real importance and the New World began to assume a larger role in English strategic thinking. What became the navigation system—acts of Parliament intended to control the flow of trade goods within the empire—first emerged during the Cromwellian interregnum in the 1650s.⁶ A further elaboration came with restoration of the monarchy when Charles II took the throne in 1660, showing that, on a most basic level, Cavalier and Roundhead had not been so far apart in their imperial designs. Nor did the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 change things much when James II was turned out in favor of his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William. They ended the failed experiment in imperial reorganization that had come just a few years before with the Dominion of New England—never to be attempted again—but they did not reject the mercantilistic thinking that underlay it.⁷ Even as they allowed the Dominion to be dismantled they revamped the administrative agencies set up to act as watchdogs over colonial affairs. With their concurrence, Parliament added to navigation acts that already restricted trade to English (broadened to include colonial) vessels and expanded the list of enumerated articles—goods that had to come from within the system or be banned.⁸

Smuggling ran rampant through the now far-flung empire, even in England itself, so imperial administrators felt pressured to tighten enforcement and reduce the revenue, both public and private, lost to illicit trade.⁹ Hence by century’s end the customs inspectors that patrolled colonial docks and searched colonial warehouses as officers of the Treasury in London, and vice-admiralty judges who heard smuggling cases in the colonies as an extension of the Admiralty court system in England.

Vice-admiralty courts in the colonies underscored the Catch-22 of imperial enforcement: allowing trade to follow its own course meant that money seeped out to commercial rivals and potential enemies like France or Spain; attempts to force trade into certain channels might curtail the smuggling, but at a substantial political as well as financial loss. Vice-admiralty justices were royal appointees who acted as judge and jury combined in the trials of accused smugglers. They shared jurisdiction with common-law courts in the colonies, where local juries decided innocence or guilt, in some instances in trials presided over by judges who were elected by the freemen of the colony. Because convictions for smuggling were rare in those common-law courts, customs collectors and inspectors took cases to the vice-admiralty courts whenever they could. The number of convictions did increase and revenue brought from the auction of confiscated ships and cargoes helped defray the increased costs of imperial administration brought by the new posts, but smuggling continued apace and local resentment burned deep. What to London might have appeared an unavoidable adjustment to local circumstance—bringing lawbreakers to justice—could, in colonial eyes, have been seen as an attempt to circumvent legal custom— the sanctity of a jury trial—in order to achieve the desired political and financial outcome.¹⁰

Even in colonies like Rhode Island, where all the highest offices were elective, governors and judges were supposed to be representatives of the crown as well as the people, symbols of imperial power as well as of provincial authority. It was a dual identity that could be difficult to maintain in time of crisis. The same was true even in colonies like Massachusetts where, since the replacement charter granted in 1691, the governor was a crown appointee. He was nonetheless expected to serve the people of the colony as well as the monarch who appointed him. The inherent challenge of serving two masters became especially daunting when imperial and provincial interests, in theory convergent, in practice diverged.

SOLDIERS AMONG CIVILIANS

The history of the British empire proves that appearances can be deceiving. Just when the empire seemed to be growing stronger it could actually be weakening from within. Such was the case in 1763, after Britain had finally beaten France in the fourth of a series of wars dating back to 1689. In the first three conflicts North America was a military sideshow. The most important fighting began and ended in Europe, and European considerations came first in the negotiations leading to peace. The last conflict, remembered as the French and Indian War on this side of the Atlantic, would be different. North American concerns were at the diplomatic and military core, determining when and how the fighting would be conducted and what would be needed to end it.

British army and naval forces had been stationed in the colonies during all three of the earlier conflicts. They were deployed on a much larger scale this time around. Relations with the colonists were often strained, allies at odds with each other occasionally illustrating the old adage about familiarity breeding contempt. British naval officers who felt that they were acting within the law when they sent out press gangs to “recruit” sailors along the colonial waterfront found that locals were convinced they did not. On occasion the locals even drove the “recruiters” back to their ships. British army officers who thought they were within their rights in issuing commands to the local militia and requisitioning supplies from local provisioners found that they too ran afoul of accepted practice. Supplies could be slow in coming or not provided at all. General Jeffrey Amherst, commander of the combined British and colonial forces, was typical of the regular army officer who disliked working with provincial leaders, who, from his perspective, put colony over empire. Theirs was hardly a smooth working relationship. Likewise for his predecessors in the early stages of the war.

With the fall of New France and the French eliminated as the primary enemy to the north and west after 1763, colonies and mother country only had each other left to blame for whatever problems of empire might remain. As a French diplomat observed to an English friend:

You are happy in the cession of Canada: we, perhaps, ought to think ourselves happy that you have acquired it. Delivered from a neighbour whom they have always feared, your other colonies will soon discover, that they stand no longer in need of your protection. You will call on them to contribute toward supporting the burthen which they have helped to bring on you, they will answer you by shaking off all dependence.¹¹

It was a perceptive, even prophetic, observation. Before being relieved of command Amherst had recommended that a sizeable contingent of regulars be kept on in the colonies, primarily for “frontier” duty in an arc from the Ohio country through Canada to Nova Scotia, but also in case they were needed closer to the seaboard “to retain the Inhabitants of our antient Provinces in a State of Constitutional Dependance upon Great Britain.”¹² That no troops would be so deployed for another five years—and then to Boston, thus setting the scene for the massacre—is less important than the fact that such use had been contemplated before the postwar surge of legislation that prompted it even passed Parliament.

Colonists who resented the presence of professional soldiers among them came by that feeling honestly, the result of experience reinforcing inheritance. Cromwell’s “New Model Army” during the Civil War notwithstanding, England had had no true standing army until after the restoration of the monarchy. The 1689 Bill of Rights would proclaim “That the raising or keeping a standing army within ...